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“We have sat back long enough and watched nothing happen,” declared North Carolina trawler Jimmy Ruhle, “It is time we moved forward and developed something we can all be a part of and all be proud of.”
In front of a banner proclaiming, “Commercial Fishermen of America – Feeding Families for 400 Years,” fishing leaders from across the U.S., announced at Pacific Marine Expo the formation of a national organization for America’s working fishing men and women. The November “coming out party” in Seattle included many former National Fisherman Highliner of the Year Award recipients, indicating the importance attached to it by fishing leaders.
Commercial Fishermen of America (CFA) will be the first ever truly national fishermen’s organization representing all regions of the U.S. and including all gear types. The vision of CFA is to promote the common interests of fishermen, to provide a forum to foster professional collaboration among fishermen, and to educate Americans about the importance of commercial fishing.
For the past year commercial fishing leaders from around the US have been meeting to plan an organization which would represent the common interests of fishermen, while promoting the values and culture of commercial fisheries and the coastal communities they support. The goal of CFA would be to serve as the means to give commercial fishermen a national presence in the minds of the public, legislators, and the media.
“The commercial fishing industry simply must unite and organize for the good of us all,” said Dale Kelley at the conference announcing CFA. Kelley, the Executive Director of the Alaska Trollers Association, has been one of the group’s organizers and will serve on its new seven-member interim structural committee. Kelley was introduced by Half Moon Bay fisherman and Institute for Fisheries Resources’ President Pietro Parravano, who along with North Carolina trawler Jimmy Ruhle and the Louisiana Shrimp Association’s Margaret Curole, were on hand at the podium to introduce the new organization.
Affirmation of the need for a strong national organization of commercial fishermen continued into the evening at the Pacific Marine Expo. At the annual National Fisherman Highliner Awards banquet Sonny Maahs, one of this year’s Highliners, said that now is the time for unity among the country’s fishermen. That sentiment was echoed many times, during the celebrations, by the past Highliner Award winners.
Fishermen today are confronted with a host of burdens and pressures scarcely known to fishermen of generations previous; pressures from imports, loss of dockside infrastructure, expensive permits, loss of nearby fishing grounds, restricted access and increasingly complex and restrictive management schemes.
The idea of creating a national voice to advocate on common issues for fishermen has been a topic both in Jerry Fraser’s “Editor’s Log” section of National Fishermen and in past PCFFA Fishermen’s News’ articles (“The Time is Now to Found a National Commercial Fishermen’s Organization,” FN January 2005, www.pcffa.org/fn-jan05.htm). A panel discussion at the 2002 Providence Fish Expo is credited with starting this latest push towards a national organizing effort.
With help from National Fisherman Editor Jerry Fraser and Senior Editor Lincoln Bedrosian, a number of fishing leaders from around the country who had voiced an interest in a national organization were approached and an initial organizing meeting was held in March of 2005 in New Orleans. A second meeting was held in Providence/New Bedford in May, but a third, scheduled for San Francisco in September, had to be cancelled due to the hurricanes that hit the Gulf Coast (affecting participants from that region). The final meeting prior to the announcement was held in Seattle during the Expo. At this meeting, an interim structural committee was formed that will focus in 2006 on creating a structure for the national organization, creating articles of incorporation, drafting of bylaws, and working on ways to define the organization’s membership.
The list of participants in the organizing meetings of the Commercial Fishermen of America is impressive. It included a number of past Highliner Award winners – Pat White (Kennebunk, Maine), Larry Simns (Annapolis, Maryland), Jimmy Ruhle (Wanchese, North Carolina), Tony Larocchi (Marathon, Florida), George Barisich (St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana), Mike McCorkle (Summerland, California) and Pietro Parravano (Half Moon Bay, California). White and Parravano had been members of the Pew Oceans Commission – the only commercial fishermen to serve on either of the two national ocean commissions. Larry Simns and Jimmy Ruhle are both members of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and Timm Timoney (Hawaii) is a former member of the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council; Dale Kelley is the Executive Director of the Alaska Trollers Association and an Alaska Commissioner to the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission. Larocchi is a recent recipient of the J. Paul Getty Award for conservation. Margaret Curole serves as a North American delegate to the World Forum of Fish Harvesters & Fishworkers (WFF); Parravano was one of the WFF organizers in 1997. Curole has furthermore been active in the “Slow Food” movement, and was a 2004 delegate to Tierra Madre along with Jeremy Brown (Washington), another CFA organizer who sits on the boards of the Washington Trollers Association and Western Fishboat Owners Association (WFOA). McCorkle is President of the Southern California Trawlers Association and a PCFFA board member. Peter Baker of the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Association (Chatham, Massachusetts) is a member of the Marine Fish Conservation Network’s (MFCN) Executive Committee.
Other members of the Steering Committee include: Alaskan fishermen Stosh Anderson (Kodiak, AK); David Bergeron (Gloucester, MA) who is Executive Director of the Massachusetts Fishermen’s Partnership (MFP); Ralph Boragine (Marathon, FL), who is Executive Director of the Monroe County Commercial Fishermen; Oliver Holm (Kodiak, AK), who is co-Vice President of the Alaska Marine Conservation Council; Ray Kane (Chatham, MA), a board member of the Massachusetts Fishermen’s Partnership and an active member of the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen’s Association; Tracy Kuhns (Lafitte, LA), President of the Association of Family Fishermen and who represents commercial fisheries on the Board of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network; Paul Parker (MA), Executive Director of the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen’s Association who also serves on the New England Fishery Management Council; Terry Pickard (Chatham, MA), a Cape Cod fisherman; Michael Roberts (Lafitte, LA),who is a Gulf Coast shrimper and founded the Louisiana Bayou Keeper; Bob Smith (Charlestown, RI), a member of the Rhode Island Lobstermen’s Association who has served as its President; Jeff White (York, ME), a gill net fisherman who is also active in the Northeast Seafood Coalition; Mary Madison from the Maryland Watermen’s Association, an attorney, professional mediator, and Editor of the Watermen’s Gazette, served as the Steering Committee meeting’s facilitator.
Sara Randall, the Institute for Fisheries Resources’ Program Director, served as chief staff for the group, with help from Allison Gordon (who had served as an AmeriCorps Watershed Steward in the IFR offices). The organizers not only represented every region of the country, but nearly every gear type and the breath of the political spectrum among the nation’s fishermen.
Despite the prominence and socio-economic importance that commercial fishing has had throughout our nation’s history, there has never been a strong nationally organized group to speak out and represent the interest of fishing men and women, and only fishing men and women. In the past there have been such organizations as the Congress of American Fishermen and the National Federation of Fishermen (NFF), organized around the passage of the 200-mile fishing zone in the Fishery Conservation & Management Act of 1976 (FCMA). NFF, the last attempt at a national fishing organization, went under in the early 1980’s. In the 1990’s an effort was made to reestablish a national fishing group, the American Seafood Harvesters Association, but deep divisions among fishing groups and the lack of adequate funding doomed this effort. Presently the only body that represents fisheries nationally is the National Fisheries Institute (NFI), whose members are primarily seafood importers, distributors, restaurant chains, and some processors, not working fishing men and women.
Many fishermen across the nation have expressed concern about the continuing erosion of fishing opportunities and infrastructure. The current trend of fishery issues and resources has been one of displacement, loss of jobs, loss of markets, and loss of trust in fishery management. Fishermen and their families, who want to continue their livelihoods while being able to make a decent living as well as to pass that tradition down to future generations, would benefit greatly from a national organization to advocate their concerns and recommendations. Many fishermen today sense a bias against them and their profession, and are increasingly concerned about negative images of fishing in the minds of the American public.
The public needs to be much better educated about the state of our fisheries resources and the economic, social and cultural importance of commercial fishing. Do they know, for example, that commercial fishing is America’s first industry? Do they know Basque, Breton and Portuguese fishing fleets were operating off our North American shores when Cabot sailed here in 1495? That Viking explorers were drying cod on the western shores of the North Atlantic? They may know about the Pilgrim’s first Thanksgiving eating turkey with Native Americans, but do they know it was cod that made the Pilgrim community self sufficient? Do they know George Washington had a commercial fishing operation for shad on the Potomac, or that it was the salmon caught in San Francisco Bay and canned at places such as Collinsville on the Sacramento River that fed the miners as they headed for the goldfields of California? Most are oblivious to America’s fishing heritage and only marginally aware of the status of our fish stocks or their importance to human health.
Commercial fishing can continue to provide the economic, social and environmental backbone of the coastal communities. The $28 billion in dockside seafood sales each year only shows part of the nationwide importance of the commercial fishing industry, as those landings support countless related jobs, from boat builders to bait suppliers, which strengthen the nation’s economy each year.
This is the question that the CFA Steering Committee has spent some time trying to figure out and will spend a lot of time on in the future. Bringing together commercial fishermen is no easy task. Having a national organization would make it easier for commercial fishermen to speak with one voice (on issues where they agree), and to work with agencies, scientists, conservation organizations, recreational anglers, family farmers, consumer and health interests, Native Americans, the maritime trades and even processors. It could also provide a forum for fishermen to resolve their own differences.
Much of the time people in our industry are focused on regional or gear type issues that affect only particular regional fisheries. However, a good management tool in one area can be totally inappropriate in another. The Commercial Fishermen of America (CFA) Steering Committee spent a lot of time analyzing what the national issues of importance are that a national group should address. Three issues kept recurring: health care, loss of infrastructure and waterfront access, and water quality. It is our belief that as we as an industry take on these issues and find ways to resolve them, this will also improve the credibility and image of the fishing industry itself.
Providing Health Insurance To All Fishing Men And Women: Most fishermen are now uninsured. Fishermen aboard U.S. registered vessels, along with other U.S. seamen, were first provided health care for “maintenance and cure” when President John Adams signed a law in 1799 creating a system of marine hospitals and contract physician services to provide for the nation’s mariners. That system, however, did not include those aboard smaller boats, and the system was abruptly ended for all fishermen in 1981 with the closure of the U.S. Public Health Service, which had evolved from the old marine hospital system. At that time, many fisheries were expanding and prospering and the loss of a public health care system did not seem so critical. But today, with many fisheries and prices in decline, many fishing dangers still remaining and an aging population, the health care situation for many fishermen has reached a crisis.
Providing a system for health insurance for fishermen may seem like a lofty goal for CFA, particularly just starting out. Our federal government can’t get it together to provide this and they’ve been working on it for years, right? But do you know that there is already a very successful state program that provides health care to all Massachusetts fishermen who choose to sign up for it? It’s called the Fishing Partnership Health Plan (FPHP) and it’s the product of a partnership between the Massachusetts Fishermen’s Partnership and Tufts Health Plan. The Fishing Partnership Health Plan was started in 1997 and now has over two thousand members of the fishing community and their families receiving health care coverage through the plan. The plan has reduced the Massachusetts rate of uninsured fishing families from 43% to 13%.
Studies of the Massachusetts plan have shown that this has been a very effective way of spending federal and state funding. Ninety percent of people covered by the FPHP did not have health coverage before joining the FPHP. The FPHP has saved $4.15 for every $1 in federal funding. Every $1 of federal funding has been matched by over $4 from the State of Massachusetts. Currently, Boston University is studying the FPHP as an ideal model for providing coverage to other underserved populations. The success of the Fishing Partnership Health Plan has also been a huge boost to the public relations of the fishing industry in Massachusetts. This fishermen's initiative is frequently praised as a proactive and creative solution to a mighty problem.
Despite significant improvements in safety, commercial fishing remains one of the most dangerous professions in the country, thus making it one of the hardest industries for which to get a health care plan. Because health and safety at sea are largely federal matters, addressing the lack of opportunity at a federal level may ultimately prove more effective. (1)
Commercial fishermen usually operate as small businesses. They are often sole proprietorships with small crews working as independent contractors that spend weeks at a time at sea. Fishing incomes are lower than the national average. For example, according to the Massachusetts Fishermen Health Partnership, in 1996 some 45 percent of fishing families in Massachusetts earned incomes less than twice the federal poverty level.
The rate of uninsured fishermen is three to four times greater than the national average. There are a number of reasons, each related to the type of work fishermen perform, that make it difficult for fishing families to access health care coverage. Fishermen struggle with market forces beyond their control, including fluctuations in fish stocks, restrictions on fishing opportunities, import competition, rising fuel costs, natural disasters, etc. The small business aspect, coupled with the rate of danger involved in commercial fishing, makes health care coverage very difficult for fishermen to afford for their families, let alone crew.
The absence of liability caps, also a consequence of eighteenth century conditions, makes injuries at sea both a magnet for lawyers and a minefield for insurers.
Fishermen from other states need federal support in order to launch a program like the FPHP. If we work together, we may just have the political clout necessary to obtain high quality affordable health care coverage for every fishing family in the United States through a similar program. In order for the FPHP to have been as successful as it has been, the fishermen had to work together as a unit and put aside differences. It is that same unity that we will need in order to get a national health care program in place.
Maintaining Infrastructure & Working Waterfront Access: No other fact of life so fundamentally undermines fishing’s coastal way of life than the alienation of traditional access that underpins the local resource-based economies of fishing. Each port needs mooring space, facilities to maintain and repair vessels, gear and supply shops, open space to work on gear, fueling facilities, ice plant(s), cold storage facilities, fish buyers/auction space, fish processors, transportation for fish and fish products, as well as the Coast Guard and/or port security.
With waterfront land values rising at astronomical rates (and taxes rising with them) current commercial fishing infrastructure waterfront usage is often considered unprofitable. It is predicted that the coastside population will increase by another 20% by 2015 (Coastal Sprawl: The Effects of the Urban Design on Aquatic Ecosystems, Beach, 2002). While coastal watershed counties comprise less than 25% of the land area in the US, they are home to 52% of the total US population. It is predicted that average increases of 3,600 people a day will move to coastal counties, reaching a population of 165 million by 2015 (US Commission on Ocean Policy, An Ocean Blueprint on Ocean Policy, 2004).
Waterfront property is being sold and quickly converted into private spaces and second homes that no longer are the center of economic activity. In Maine, for example, only 25 miles of shoreline support over 26,000 fishing-related jobs and provide the access necessary to sustain an industry worth over $740 million, according to the Island Institute. The pressures that drive the commercial fishing industry from these vital pieces of infrastructure are mounting. Across the nation in different ports, the same story is being told over and over. Fishermen can’t afford to live by the water anymore, they can’t afford to even keep their boats docked in the port, and in some cases have resorted to having to trailer their boats in by truck each day before they go fishing. Such pressure on the fleet cannot be sustained for long. The fishing industry needs to address the loss of infrastructure if it is going to continue to be viable.
Addressing Water Pollution: Each year we dump more than 22 billion tons of pollutants into the sea. According to the U.N. Environmental Programme, the estimated composition of marine chemical pollution is: 44% agricultural & industrial runoff; 33 % is propellants, hydrocarbons, and biocides that enter the ocean from precipitation; 12% from maritime accidents, ships dumping bilge water, ballast water, and garbage; 10% industrial, municipal, and agricultural waste and dredging spills, and; 1% offshore resource mining for oil and gas. In addition to that, each year the world dumps about 100 million tons of plastics, 17 million tons of sewage and sludge, 5 million tons of oil, and 5 trillion gallons of toxic waste into the oceans. (Life on An Ocean Planet, 2005). We have been dumping things into our oceans in mass amounts for a very long time, assuming that “dilution is the solution.” As people who make our living in and around the sea, we are seeing the ill effects of those lines of thoughts in our nets.
Besides directly killing fish, pollution reduces the productive capacity of the sea itself, and when toxins do enter the marine food chain, fishermen are then blamed for providing potentially unhealthy food.
In the United States, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found in its 2002 National Water Quality Inventory that over half of the estuarine areas assessed were polluted to the extent that their use was compromised for aquatic life, drinking water, swimming, boating, or fish consumption. 90 percent of impaired waterways do not now meet water quality standards because of non-point source pollution (US Commission on Ocean Policy, An Ocean BluePrint on Ocean Policy, 2004).
The fishermen are poised to come out on top on the water quality issue, especially in the eyes of the public. This is an issue that the general public can grasp onto and will help us with. Who doesn’t want clean beaches? Who doesn’t want to be able to eat seafood that is not contaminated? Whom better to help protect the ocean than the people who depend on it for their livelihoods and the people that bring the rest of the country the bounty of the sea? Fishermen are positioned to play a leading role in renewing society’s relationship with the sea. Seafood is generally perceived to be healthy, with solid science to back this up. Fishermen can be seen as protectors of the public values of clean water, pristine beaches and healthy food, much as farmers are seen as stewards of a healthy countryside.
“We see Commercial Fishermen of America (CFA) as a force to be reckoned with,” said Margaret Curole. “It is sorely needed in these uncertain times.”
CFA Steering Committee members elected to the Structural Committee are: Pat White (Jeff White, alternate), David Bergeron, Jimmy Ruhle, Margaret Curole, Mike McCorkle, Jeremy Brown and Dale Kelley, with the Institute for Fisheries Resources’ Project Director Sara Randall serving as staff for the effort. Over the following year the Structural Committee will help create Articles of Incorporation, Bylaws and a national organizational structure for CFA to include all regions.
This next year the CFA is planning on visiting regional areas (often in association with trade shows such as Seattle’s Pacific Marine Expo and Providence’s Fish Expo) in order to make connections with large numbers of fishermen and to gather input and ideas on the direction and formation of Commercial Fishermen of America. You will see us next at the Maryland Watermen’s Associations 32nd Annual East Coast Commercial Fishermen's & Aquaculture Trade Exposition to be held on January 27- 29 at the Ocean City Convention Center in Ocean City, Maryland. Look for us there!
Jeremy Brown lives in Washington State and is a long-time commercial fisherman who sits on the Boards of the Washington Trollers Association (WTA) and Western Fishboat Owners Association (WFOA). Sara Randall is the Project Director for the Institute for Fisheries Resources (IFR) San Francisco Office. For more information about CFA, please contact Sara Randall at: (415)561-3474, or email to fishermenofamerica@gmail.com.
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